quasigeostrophy | What I’ve Been Reading, & General Update (Reply)

So… I last posted right before the end of my days as a grad student at Purdue, leaving without a Ph.D. I had a few projects on which I wanted to work. Let’s see how those are going, shall we?

Find a job. Still working on that.
Finish the modeling paper that is still in progress. Still working on that. Slowly.
Clean house, including sorting through media and other stuff. Have done a bit of media culling. Still need to do much more. Have started major cleaning, but it’s rather slow, thanks to allergies and general physical condition.
Work out. Decided to see the orthopedist about my right knee, since it had been getting a lot worse over time since I injured it in St. Croix last July. Got a prescription for a few weeks of physical therapy and ended up with possibly the best physical therapist I’ve ever had. I’m done with PT appointments, but still diligently doing the exercises and stretches twice a day. I’ve also started using our new rower every few days, and I hope soon to get back on the bike, either the stationary recumbent or our hybrid bicycle, since I did manage to change the quick-release seat post to a regular bolted one so I can ride it around outside once my knee is in better shape (and if we ever get out of this heat wave). The knee does seem to be doing better, but I need to be patient. I didn’t get out of shape overnight (six years of grad school was harder on me physically than I realized), and I injured my knee 10 months before I decided to go to PT, so improvement isn’t going to happen overnight, either.
Catch up on reading a lot of the fiction that has been piling up on my metaphorical “to-read” pile. I’ve managed to catch up on a few of the books at the top of my list.

Speaking of reading, back when I last had time to read fiction, I used to keep track of what I’ve recently read on my LiveJournal, so (as this also posts there) I might as well start that back up here. I try not to be spoilery. Since late May, I’ve read:

“A Feast for Crows” – George R.R. Martin. Came out too soon before I returned to school for me to have read it then. I know a lot of people consider this the weakest in the series, as, the way GRRM structured it and the first part of the next volume, several common favorite characters are “missing.” I liked the different POVs we were given and new places in Westeros and Essos where we had not yet been. It also helped me stop considering each volume of “A Song of Ice and Fire” as a stand-alone novel. To me, it’s one long story. Long being the key word.
“A Dance with Dragons” – George R.R. Martin. Latest “A Song of Ice and Fire” volume. More great stuff. Solidified that ASOIAF is my absolute favorite fantasy book series. And again I join the teeming millions waiting for GRRM to finish the next installment, especially considering some of the specific cliffhangers at the end of this one. Almost all the characters are present well before the end of this one, as it follows not only “A Feast for Crows” timeline, but continues a bit farther.
“Redshirts” – John Scalzi. After two GRRM doorstops, I needed something light and relatively short. This was perfect. A humorous send-up of the trope derived from the original “Star Trek” TV series. The characterizations are light, intentionally, but not lacking.
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” – J.K. Rowling. Another book that came out too close to when I returned to school. Having seen both parts of the films which were based on it, and not being greatly concerned with spoilers, it was still nice to read some of the details the films by necessity left out, and to see that some of the clever parts of the films were in the original.
“The Fire” – Katherine Neville. The sequel to probably my favorite single book of fiction ever, Neville’s “The Eight,” I started to read this in Massachusetts a couple of years ago over spring break. Didn’t finish it, and was never able to get back to it. Read it this time on my Nook Color, and, while it was not as good as “The Eight,” it was nice to see some of the characters again, and to enjoy the author’s trips through history and around the world. In my opinion, Dan Brown wishes he could write a big puzzle story as well as Katherine Neville. “The Fire” also sort of made me feel like she may have one more novel in this story still unwritten. And she’s alluded to just that in interviews. One thing that did annoy me greatly, though, was the fact that the Nook version is full of typesetting errors. Duplicated sentences and mangled paragraphs throughout, obviously not author errors. They’re not in the hardcover edition. I’ve already brought it up with Barnes & Noble, Random House, and Katherine herself.
“The Warrior’s Apprentice” – Lois McMaster Bujold. Almost 10 years ago, I was persuaded to get into LMB’s “Vorkosigan Saga” by a now-ex and several friends. I picked up an omnibus of the first two novels in internal chronological order (“Shards of Honor,” “Barrayar” bundled in an omnibus called “Cordelia’s Honor”) on a trip Toni and I had made to California, and I read about half of the first one on the plane ride home. I remember enjoying it, but for some reason I cannot remember, I never picked it back up. Since I have almost the entire series in e-pub format on my Nook Color, I decided to give it a try, and so I started with the third volume, “The Warrior’s Apprentice,” which introduced Miles Vorkosigan, the protagonist of most of the series. I enjoyed it a lot. In particular, aside from Miles’ cleverness on his feet, I like the universe LMB has developed. It’s several hundred years in the future, yet society is still very much imperfect. Full of greed, petty squabbles, and very few hard handwaving technological devices (wormhole travel is probably the biggest). There are still parts of spacecraft in zero-g; communication takes a long time; and there are other limitations. I liked TWA enough to go ahead and try the rest of the series again, so I’ve gone back to read…
“Shards of Honor” – Lois McMaster Bujold. As I mentioned above, this was the first LMB Vorkosigan Saga novel I tried, but didn’t finish, in 2002. Rereading it now. I’m only a few chapters in and I can’t remember any of it from my initial read nearly 10 years ago. I do think I’m enjoying it more this time, though.

After that, I’m not sure what I’ll read. I often roll lists over in my head, or even in posts online, but I defer to how I’m feeling when it is time to pick up the next book. I may go with something by Neal Stephenson, as I’ve only so far read his “Cryptonomicon,” which I absolutely loved. I may re-read Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhikers Guide” series, or Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” or something else new, like Gareth Roberts’ novelization of Douglas Adams “missing” “Doctor Who” story, “Shada.”

In the meantime, I’ll also still be job hunting, cleaning, and working on my knee and general fitness.

Originally published at Abnormality Locality. You can comment here or there.